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Dessert

Red, White, and Black Currant Jelly

Currant jelly made from red, white, and black currants with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes. The science ↓

Red, White, and Black Currant Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Pick the currants and remove all stems.

  2. Place the currants in a pan and heat until hot.

  3. Bruise the currants and strain them through a fine sieve.

Make the jelly

  1. Return the juice to the saucepan and add 1 pound of sugar for every pint of juice.

  2. Boil for 20 minutes, skimming as needed.

  3. If the fruit was wet, boil for up to 30 minutes or more.

  4. Pour into jars and cover with paper once cool.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Currants
Provide the pectin, acid and flavour that let the juice set into jelly.
Lump sugar
Sweetens the juice and helps it gel by binding water and thickening the set.

The step that matters

Boiling the juice with sugar. Boiling long enough drives off water so the sugar and pectin reach the concentration needed to set. Undercooked jelly stays runny, while overcooked jelly can turn stiff or dull in flavour.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More currant jelly recipes

Red 93Black 55Sauce 50White 38French 11Tartlets 7 See all 365 →

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